Tropico 5 is the best installment in the Caribbean strategy-sim series so far, but its rush to simplify things may have gone too far.

If you’ve played any of the Tropico games, you’ll know what to expect from Tropico 5. You’re still the dictator of a small Caribbean island, and you still have some of the most incompetent advisers in the history of politics. Through careful planning and some underhanded deals, you try to keep your citizens happy enough that they don’t vote you out of office before you can accomplish the single-player campaign’s goals.

Like the other titles in the series, Tropico 5 combines its trademark wit with the challenge of managing a truly volatile settlement, one where a rebel uprising could remove you from office at any time. While the challenge of the game is nice, some of the changes in Tropico 5 actually make things harder to handle.

That said, it’s still a fun take on the genre. Think of it as Sim City, but with a seriously irreverent twist.

Tropico 5 starts you out not as “El Presidente,” but as a lowly Caribbean governor in the service of the Crown. This serves as your introduction to the game’s mechanics, which will be very familiar to returning fans. Once you get your approval rating among your citizens high enough, you can declare independance, assuming your rightful place as El Presidente.

Once you’ve gained your independance, you’ll advance through the years from the Victorian Era through the World Wars era, into the Cold War era and even up to Modern Times. Along the way, you’ll unlock new technologies that take will take your island from a conglomeration of Caribbean shacks to a nuclear-armed world power. In this effort you’ll be guiding by your bumbling chief advisor, Penultimo, and a wide array of equally useless “experts.”

Your advisors are one of the high points of Tropico 5. As in the previous games, they offer up moronic ideas that are just rewarding enough that you have to consider implementing them. For example, when the threat of invasion looms, Penultimo concocts a scheme to make our enemies less likely to attack by borrowing so much money the island’s credit rating goes in the toilet. This, he says, will stop the invasion because no one wants to hurt someone who owes them so much money. He’s apparently never met a loan shark before.

Besides just working toward the goals the scenario sets for you, you also need to make sure that the populace is content. There are several factions living on Tropico, and all of them have expectations. The trouble is that you can’t make everyone happy, no matter how hard you try. Every decision you make that pleases one faction will anger another, and like most politicians, you’ll settle for having 51 percent of the people on your side. Let happiness deteriorate too far, and you could be voted out of office. Even worse, you might find yourself with a rebel uprising on your hands.

If you manage to stay in office long enough, you might find yourself needing a replacement. If so, you can always turn to a member of your dynasty, one of the new additions to Tropico 5. Throughout the game, you’ll have the opportunity to add members to your family dynasty. Some will be cousins selected through arduous singing or arm wrestling competitions. Others might appear from an illicit affair a family member had.

Wherever your dynasty members arise from, you can appoint them to cushy jobs, send them off to represent Tropico on diplomatic missions, or even have them attend to college abroad. Each of them will have special attributes. Some might be great generals, while others are environmentalists. Put them to work in the right places, and they’ll improve your island paradise.

Another big addition to Tropico 5 is four-player multiplayer. Hop into a game, and you’ll find yourself sharing an island with three other players. As your cities grow, you’ll have to decide how you want to handle the other players. Will you form an alliance, or treat them as an enemy? Basically, you have the ability to interact with your opponents however you please, and it’s a lot of fun. Most importantly, it plays almost identical to the single-player game, meaning that you don’t have to learn a whole new skill set just for multiplayer.

New name, new player perspective, and a new focus on strategy. The Bureau: XCOM Declassified has come a looong way since 2010 when 2K Marin first showed off its first-person shooter re-imagining of the iconic isometric strategy game, and according to Senior User Interface Artist Patrick Guarino, the end result is worthy of the X-COM name. In a candid interview on the eve of The Bureau’s launch, Guarino admitted he didn’t always feel that way.

“Starting off, I was a little concerned it didn’t feel as true to X-COM as it should have,” Guarino told me. “Particularly in those early first-person days, it did feel a lot like BioShock, and that was particularly concerning because it was coming from a team that just shipped a BioShock game.”

“We’ve transitioned into something that feels, to me, a lot smarter and more challenging,” he continued. “The first iteration felt very much like exploring a small area and shooting the same types of aliens over and over again while dragging two agents with you as best you could. All the interesting things were happening between the large story missions. Now we have a much better mix. It’s something I’m really excited to have worked on.”

Judging by The Bureau’s current third-place position in the top selling titles on Steam (as of August 19), behind only Payday 2 and Saints Row IV, gamers are excited to play it, too. That’s not something many X-COM (and XCOM: Enemy Unknown) fans could say up until recently, this humble scribe included. But after learning how and why 2K Marin moved away from its original BioComShock model, a process Game Front chronicled in a one-on-one interview with The Bureau’s Creative Director Morgan Gray, and hearing how it actually plays thanks to some recent The Bureau hands-on previews by the GF team, my interest is piqued.

That renewed interest also sparked a number of fresh questions, questions I thought XCOM diehards might want answered before they decide to part with their hard-earned dollars. First and foremost: will The Bureau provide the same type of challenge XCOM is famous for? We know there is agent permadeath, but is losing agents a real risk and will it carry the same curse-at-your-monitor impact?

“Our suggested level of difficulty is actually the second hardest, Veteran,” Guarino said. “That’s a challenge. You’ll have agents dying, it will hurt, and you’ll have to swap them out. We really wanted to make players responsible for the safety of their agents, very much in the style of the original X-COM games.”

One of the biggest leaps in going up in difficulty from Normal to Veteran, Guarino noted, will be the loss of the ability to revive downed agents and put them back into play. On Veteran, agents felled by Sectoid blasts or Berserker bashes can be stabilized, but not revived. The difference, Guarino said, is that stabilized agents will live, but they cannot be used again during that particular battle. As a result, Veteran players will find themselves fighting alone if they’re not careful.

Talking about The Bureau’s difficulty levels also got me thinking about replayability, an element that helped make the original X-COM, in particular, such a classic. Unfortunately, Guarino told me, one of the features that made X-COM worth playing over and over and over again, level randomization, is out.

“We don’t have any randomization as far as the levels go,” he said. “The biggest chance for replayability is in the difficulty, but also in the way that you approach battles and the team building aspect of it. Each agent has a perk tree, so you can perk them differently with different skills. So even if you go through the game with a mixture of agents and skills, you likely haven’t gotten the whole range of abilities yet. So there is definitely replayability there. There are also different choices you make throughout, and they will have an impact on what you see at the end of the game.”

Citadels offers the standard RTS fare: Players mine and refine resources, build defensive structures, train troops, and attack enemies. However, the game’s two main features consist of first boring, and then frustrating, the player.

The issues begin with simple unit selection. Yes, the most basic feature of an RTS — a feature so basic that no one normally even thinks about or comments on it — is abysmally executed. What should be a smooth and transparent game element is clunky and inaccurate. To select a single unit, I found myself unable to simply click on the unit itself — it seems I’d have to counter-intuitively click a little off to the side. And God forbid I would try to drag a selection box in order to command a group of units — there’s a delay in the dragging, and it just feels clumsy.

Once you actually have a group of units selected and have ordered it to move or attack — commands for which there are no hotkeys, because apparently we are still in the early ’90s — you then get to watch them all clip together onto the same spot as they walk or when they eventually reach their destination. The models have no collision with each other, so you often find yourself wondering whether that is just one unit standing there, or 10.

That is assuming, of course, that the units even arrive at their destination. The pathing in Citadels is just as horrible as the selection — units will randomly get stuck on geometry and just give up. At some point, I sent a group of workers to mine some stone, only to discover 10 minutes later that all but one were standing idle a few feet away from the resource. Is there an option to select idle workers? Of course not — that would be far too convenient.

I can’t blame the workers for having a hard time finding the stone, because I had great difficulty doing so myself. Resources aren’t displayed on the minimap — you have to spot them by eye. Finding trees for wood isn’t an issue, but stone is another story entirely. Apparently, despite the fact that you see entire mountains made of stone, you can’t just mine wherever you want to — you must locate the tiny three-foot by three-foot patch of stone that is selectable as a mining resource, which blends in almost perfectly with the surrounding environment. If I wanted to test my visual acuity, I’d play “Where’s Waldo.”

The pathing and selection issues spill over into combat, which is dreadfully sluggish. You can forget about any real degree of micromanagement. By the time you select a unit to, say, move it away before it takes any more hits, it is already dead. Want to focus-fire down a certain enemy unit? Whoops, you’ve accidentally clicked on the ground instead, and your army is now advancing without attacking. While you can set your units’ behavior — aggressive, defensive, or passive — the game lacks even a simple “attack” button, forcing you to click on your enemy in order to issue the command.

Fortunately, the other aspect of the game — base-building and management — is just as tedious, so the combat doesn’t seem that out of place in comparison. When give your worker the build command, he must first run back to your town hall to collect the construction resources needed. It adds a level of tedium that can be argued is included in the name of realism, but realistically, a single worker does not carry the entire batch of resources needed to construct a building in one trip anyway. If you want realism, Citadels, then go all-out; otherwise, stick with the genre’s convention and stop messing with a formula that has worked for the past two decades.

Creating your army is equally tedious, as recruiting a soldier first entails creating a worker, then sending that peasant off to the barracks for training. Factor in the way that workers tend to bunch up on the same square, and you’re not sure how many you just sent to become soldiers. Fun!

Basic RTS amenities like hotkeys and tooltips are either absent altogether or severely lacking. You can’t even queue actions. Once a worker finishes constructing a building, he’ll wait around until you remember to check on him and issue another command.

That is assuming, of course, that you can even figure out what it is you’re meant to be doing. The game’s tutorial does as little as possible to help you out, and in-game instructions are spotty at best. During missions, I often found myself unsure of how to accomplish the listed goals. A new objective would briefly appear onscreen, telling me to “Train 9 soldiers and 9 archers.” But the only lasting text on the objective list stated “Train an army.” What if I didn’t remember the exact numbers? What if I had missed that brief notification altogether?

While this is barely worth mentioning given the larger problems, Citadels’ graphics are nothing impressive. I wouldn’t call the game ugly; the visuals are simply dated and unremarkable. The unit dialogue is all gibberish — or perhaps Celtic, who knows — so you can’t understand anything being said. Yes, perhaps this is in the name of historical accuracy, but I believe we would all appreciate the dialogue and voice acting much more if the words were coherent.

Since we may as well continue to pile on at this point, the options menu is also cumbersome. To adjust the volume, there are no sliders — if you want to go from 100% to 0% music volume, you must click the arrow and tick all the way through to 0%, a few percent at a time. The only settings available to customize are audio and video; Citadels lacks any form of gameplay options or key customization.

If Citadels had perhaps attempted to accomplish something original and failed, it could at least be lauded for trying. However, the game doesn’t try to change the RTS formula in any meaningful way, and in fact takes several steps back along the genre’s evolutionary path. The combination of missing strategy game features, AI and pathing issues, unit selection and command options, and mechanics that drag out the game for no justifiable reason result in an experience that feels more like a chore than a game. Everything — from establishing an economy to building an army to attacking the enemy — simply involves too many mundane and time-consuming steps. I find the very thought of playing again daunting as I mentally work through every laborious step I’ll have to take in any given mission. Every poor design decision and every technical failure combine to create an experience that you simply want to end.

Final verdict? Put it back in the oven; this game is not ready. Citadels is simply tedious to play. I never once found myself having any semblance of fun. Not only is Citadels not worth the $40 price tag it is somehow selling for, I couldn’t recommend this game even if it were free-to-play. Maybe if the developers had more time and a bigger budget, Citadels could have been salvaged into something at least half-decent. But as it stands, this is one of the worst games I’ve ever played — it simply fails in execution in just about every way imaginable.

Eador: Masters Of The Broken World isn’t quite as bizarre as it seems at first. It’s a bit strange – mostly thanks to the flowering of innovation and experimentation in Eastern European development houses – but it’s a sort of cultural strangeness, rather than any sort of downright surrealism.

Eador: Masters of the Broken World is actually a remake of a previous game – Eador: Genesis – but with an actual budget and development team. Genesis was developed by essentially one programmer who farmed out art duty with commissions, which makes it the largest single-developer game I’ve ever played. It was very well-received in Russian-speaking countries, but the lack of an English translation kept it from breaking into the Anglophone world. Genesis was finally translated in late 2012 after the announcement of Masters of the Broken World, presumably to build excitement in English-speaking countries that had yet to experience it.

Both Eador games start with the same premise, and this story preamble acts as the tutorial to the game mechanics. You are a villager in some backwoods town who has been apprenticed under a powerful wizard. The wizard reveals to you that it is your destiny to overthrow the nearby king, and gives you advice on how to go through with it. Once you do, you find that things aren’t quite as they seem; the world is broken into shards, and it has always been this way. You decided to inhabit a mortal body to see what it is like, but now that you are back in your original form, you remember your goal: unite all the shards and form one single, unified world from the shards floating in the void.

It’s, to be blunt, a very Russian sort of story. There is a strange optimistic fatalism infecting every inch of Eador’s otherwise generic fantasy setting. From your sassy responses to the imp’s wry, bleak stories, Eador comes across as a universe where everyone is “used to the pain.” Things are bad here, but nobody really cares anymore. They just shrug and soldier on with their lives. The mortals don’t care, and the immortals ruling the shards are too petty to think about the future. You seem to be the only one with any sort of genuine concern.

If you have played any game in the Heroes of Might and Magic series (hopefully HoMM2 or 3), Eador will be instantly familiar to you. You control a hero that captures provinces for their income and fights off enemy incursions. When your hero encounters an enemy, he enters into a tactical battle on a hexagonal grid and dukes it out with the individual units. If he wins, you get the spoils of war; if he loses, you have to revive him at your castle and rebuild the army from scratch.

Where Eador sets out to make itself unique is in how it handles provinces. Eador’s province system is something akin to a cross between the provinces of grand strategy titles (Total War, Hearts of Iron) and a randomized dungeon crawler. Once you have defeated the garrison and taken a province, you must set up your own garrison and improve the area. Most importantly, though, your hero can “explore” (spend a turn to find stuff and tick up the exploration percentage) the province, unveiling battles to level your hero (and his army) and creating events that can add bonuses or detriments to the province. The battles can be performed at any time, so exploration is ideal if you are idly building up for your next big push.

Building up your castle is very simple. You select the structure you want to build, pay for it, and it’s built. You can only build one structure per turn, so you have to prioritize what you want first. Structures provide both passive (more gold per turn) and active (new units, spells, and items) bonuses to your army, and each castle can only support so many structures of a particular type. I’ve found it best to specialize in a particular alignment: good, evil, or neutral. Alignments give you access to different kinds of units and strategies (good, for example, focuses on health and defense), and having units of the same alignment in an army boosts overall morale in battle.

When you encounter an enemy hero, attempt to conquer a province, or go into a dungeon, you enter the tactical combat mode. As mentioned before, this is a map where each of your army’s units is represented on a hexagonal grid that they move around on and attack through. Your goal is to overwhelm the enemy with superior numbers or strategy, and force them to either retreat or die. If this isn’t your thing, you can auto-resolve battles, just like in the Total War series. Perhaps I’m bad, but it always felt like the computer auto-resolved battles better than I actually fought them. I kept playing each battle, though, as auto-resolving every time reduced a lot of the depth.

Unlike fights in, say, Star Wars, the Galactica went into its fights without moving, training weapons and turning its broadside toward the enemy like a wooden ship fighting in the Caribbean. Its commanders watched their radar screens, issuing orders to crew. Battles were spent putting out fires, repairing key systems, locking on weapons and repelling boarders. That’s what FTL is like — it’s a Rogue-like, and in every situation, you’re spending your time managing the interior of your ship, rather than puttering around the battlefield, avoiding incoming fire.

That kind of battle is tense because you know you have to take your licks and bear it. The punches (or missiles, as the case may be) are on their way. Did you do enough to prepare to fend them off? Can you spare crew members to leave their posts to put out fires, or should you just let them burn and hope to vent those sections into the vacuum of space? FTL puts you in fight after fight like that, and it does so with a lot of tension and a high degree of difficulty that never feels cheap, but always strains. This is, after all, space travel we’re talking about. It’s not easy.

The basic premise of FTL is this: you command a ship, on the run from an evil Rebel fleet as you try to return to your Federation allies. You’re carrying information vital to destroying the Rebel threat, and so you’re being hunted, at length, as you cross the galaxy. You travel each sector by making faster-than-light jumps from point to point, where you’ll hit a random encounter. Most of these are battles, though some aren’t, and winning can reward you with things like fresh weapons, currency to purchase upgrades and repairs, and ammunition.

The majority of the game is in resource management. You need to cross the galaxy, staying ahead of your pursuers, and you need fuel and ammo to do it. Run out of either at a key moment, and you’re doomed. Well, actually, you’re doomed anyway — it’s important to keep that in mind. You’re going to die, a lot, because FTL is deliciously difficult.

That’s a good thing. The game beautifully toes the line between being so difficult it feels rewarding and so difficult you want to uninstall it and send it out an airlock. It’ll punish you for your mistakes, but death is never a huge setback, because you’ll run every game from the start of your escape anyway. And every time you die, you learn — you learn which weapons and systems are worth pursuing, how best to manage your resources, and what upgrades are vital to your survival.

First-person shooter slash tower defense title Sanctum is free this weekend on Steam, giving you a chance to take on its legions of enemy creatures with as many as three friends.

Sanctum requires players to set up towers of various types and create mazes, just like in other tower defense titles. The difference from other games in the genre is that Sanctum lets players run around the map, interacting with enemies with weapons they carry, as well. It allows you to quickly run around the battlefield and deal with issues.

Sanctum remains free until 1 p.m. on Saturday. If you decide you like it, you can snag it for 75 percent off this weekend, along with all the game’s DLC maps: the total for the whole package, game included, is only $5. Download it on Steam right here.

Kick off the weekend by playing Sanctum for FREE starting now through Sunday at 1PM Pacific Time.

You can also pickup Sanctum or the Sanctum Collection this weekend only at 75% off the regular price! Sale ends Monday, May 7th at 10AM Pacific Time.

Additionally, check out the just released Yogscave DLC that is available free for all Sanctum owners!

If you already have Steam installed, click here to install or play Sanctum. If you don’t have Steam, you can download it

Two former developers with EA Sports’ Tiburon studio have departed to start their own venture, and the very first thing they’ve done is announce a strategy title coming to PC later this year.

The studio is called Pixel Foundry, founded by Volga Aksoy and Jerry Phaneuf, and their game is called BlackSpace. You can check out a bit of a weird teaser for it below — which seems to be more a graphical test than an actual trailer, so judge it accordingly. But the concept of the game sounds appealing.

According to Pixel Foundry’s website:

BlackSpace is a unique form of real-time strategy, combining elements of action with an emphasis on economic and defensive efficiency. Players will find themselves on the outskirts of explored space, harvesting minerals, and supplying markets, while using the resources around them to sustain their operations as well as the lives of the colonist workers.

The game takes place on X class asteroids, players will control both surface and orbital operations with the use of a specialized low gravity operation support vehicle. The vehicle controls take skill to maneuver safely, but once mastered, it becomes an extension of the players hand, commanding base operations, pilot drilling dig sites, prospecting large and unusual mineral deposits, and if need be, supporting the base’s defense.

Sounds like there’s a lot of potential there. The site also says the game space surrounds each asteroid and extends into orbit, which suggests you’ll have lots of space to work with and planning to do with your bases, as well as stuff like orbital platforms and satellites.

Pixel Foundry said in a press release to VG247 that it hopes to get the game community highly involved in the whole process of the development of BlackSpace, with features and information being released incrementally throughout the year in order to gather feedback. The developer also intends to update a blog about the game on its site, which you can check out right here.

After first-person shooters, the genre most inundated with entries that people can’t seem to get enough of may well be tower defense. Cruising Steam, it seems as though the fields of tower defense titles might never end, and they’re all cheap. And they’re all fun, to be honest: it’s almost difficult to make a tower defense game that’s not fun.

But with so much competition in the genre, there are also some very cool games out there that take the basic skeleton of tower defense and flesh it out with interesting innovations. Anomaly: Warzone Earth makes you the attacking force fighting off enemy towers. Sanctum mixes tower defense with FPS. And Defenders of Ardania, a new TD game from Paradox Interactive, delivers a honed real-time strategy experience overlaid on a TD framework.

Broken down to its absolute simplest, Defenders of Ardania is a tower defense game. You’ll earn money over time, spend it on towers, and use them to keep attacking groups of enemies from destroying your base. Levels are set up on a grid, and you’ll create defensive mazes to slow down enemy advances. It’s all pretty standard, except for one thing: You’re attacking the other guy too.

In a twist, the enemy is also setting up towers to defend a base, and you’ll spend resources to dispatch various kinds of units to run the gauntlet and attack your opponent’s stronghold. Some just run for the opposite end of the maze, while others attack enemy units or towers along the way. The more units you send, the more experience they gain, making them more powerful, and before long, you’ll have access to “hero” units who are supercharged.

What results is a game that feels like it cribbed some awesome ideas from WarCraft III and other RTS games to add a surprising degree of depth to a tower defense game. Defenders of Ardania quickly becomes a battle of attrition, once you max out the towers you can build. Strategy is a result of constantly spamming units of various types, reinvesting your wealth, and adding and removing towers to open new paths or overtake an enemy’s portion of the maze. But you’re always limited by certain caps, like number of towers or number of units, meaning many battles become tough fights of willpower.

Ardania packs a campaign mode with a whole bunch of missions aligned to its story, plus a multiplayer mode in which up to four players can duke it out and can even take on AI enemies. It has both a tendency to be interesting, and to be a frantic mess. But in general, Ardania is a mix of quick thinking and slow, methodical gameplay, and it certainly seems as though it’ll offer tower defense fans a little something new in a genre full of similarities.

Defenders of Ardania is due on Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, the Playstation Network on Dec. 8, and Paradox is also releasing an iPad version. The downloadable title will run $14.99 on Steam and PSN, $4.99 on iTunes, and 1,200 MS Points on Xbox 360.

You’ve always wanted to be a starship captain, right? Of course you have! Anybody reading this site likely has plenty of experience imagining commanding a vessel in battle against some unscrupulous alien enemy. Stellar Impact gives you that ability, allowing you to choose your ship and her abilities and then join a fleet and head into battle.

We’ve got a trailer below showing a little bit of the massively multiplayer ship-to-ship action on offer in Stellar Impact. It reminds me a bit of the free-to-play Battlestar Galactica MMO, but with more ships broadsiding each other — which I’m definitely into.

The Daily Independent is a recurring feature in which we shine a light into the darkened wilderness of indie gaming, illuminating both the good and the bad of what we find there.

We’re in the dying hours of the Humble Indie Bundle 3 offer — if you haven’t gotten it, go get it, how many times do I have to tell you — and in honor of the package of no fewer than 12 PC indie titles, we’re checking out Revenge of the Titans for today’s Daily Independent. It carries 8-bit stylings, tower defense sensibilities, and real-time strategy concepts. Oh, and there are aliens bent on destroying Earth.

If it sounds like a winning combination, it is. In each of Revenge of the Titan’s missions, you’re tasked with defending a stronghold against advancing enemies. Some die fast, some take more punishment, some are massive bosses — all of them are marching the most direct route toward your fortress, bent on its destruction. The tools you have to stop them are only what you’ve brought with you.

Where Revenge of the Titans excels is not in giving you towers for defense, but in making you choose what you want and need for each new battle. Between each fight, you’ll have resources to spend on a huge Periodic Table-like research tree, and how you allocate those resources can determine how well you do in each mission. Should you research concrete barriers to stop advancing enemies, or explosive weapons? It’s this progression and the huge amount of options that makes building your forces interesting.

Meanwhile, on the battlefield, speed is of the essence. You can’t just rely on the income of killing your enemies to give you what you need to win the day, you’ll need to mine for resources as well, which means making decisions between placing refineries to grow your income (and try to steal all the minerals from a given area to incur a money bonus at the end of the mission) and placing the towers you need to survive. It can go pretty fast — place your towers in the path of the enemy and they’ll be destroyed, or find yourself low on resources with an unprotected flank and you may need to quickly sell off your buildings. Revenge of the Titans manages to be simple in execution and complex in its planning, requiring players to be both strategically minded and quick on the left mouse button.

If there’s a place where Revenge of the Titans falters, at least in the opening campaign of missions, it’s that it gets a little repetitive. But it’s great in short bursts of tower defense goodness, with depth enough to keep players considering their overall battle strategy in each mission. And for the rock-bottom prices available with the Humble Indie Bundle 3 (buy it here for a little while longer, give a little more, it’s for charity), there’s definitely no going wrong with this strategy hybrid.

One of the things I’ve always hated about tower defense games is the helplessness. You set up your defenses, planning for the monsters coming your way and what you’ll need to defeat them, and when you’re finished or you run out of resources, you’re left hoping you covered all the angles and thought of everything you’ll need.

When your defenses are lacking, there’s little or nothing you can do. Monsters hobble through and destroy the thing you’re defending, deal damage to your castle, or in one TDF game I played, abduct your sheep for their alien experiments. It’s a bummer to just watch failure mark inexorably toward your defenseless sheep.

In Sanctum, you’re not powerless. In fact, you’re powerful, and you’re not only the builder of the maze and the commander of the defense grid that stops enemies from attacking your important energy core, you’re also a soldier on the ground carrying three powerful weapons with which to affect the fate of your defense. Sanctum gives you tower-defense gameplay from a first-person perspective — you can run around the game field as you set up your defenses, then whip out your sniper rifle or assault rifle and join the fight yourself.

Each Unreal Engine 3-built level pits the player against hordes of various kinds of alien enemies, and each of those has a weak point where it’s vulnerable to gun fire. Dealing with the various brands of enemies requires various brands of towers and tactics, as with other games in the genre. You’ll use gatling gun turrets against fast enemies, lightning turrets against heavily armored ones, anti-aircraft turrets to destroy flying monsters. Each of the turrets can be upgraded with resources you earn as you complete each wave, and the guns you carry can be upgraded as well. Along with the assault and sniper rifles, you also get a freeze gun that can slow or stop enemies as they move past your defenses.

Sanctum includes five different maps, each with about 30 waves of enemies to battle through. Each is mostly a blank slate when it starts up; you determine where blocks go to create a maze that enemies have to march through to reach the goal, and then build towers up on those blocks. Thankfully, Sanctum throws in a teleportation system to help you get around so you don’t have to try to run around the map, and even if you get caught in the trenches with the enemy, you can’t die — you can only get tossed around some, which seriously messes up your aim.

It’s in these five maps where the big criticism of Sanctum lies — it’s too damn short. While each map features lots of waves, having only a few levels means you’ll only stretch a few hours out of the game when you play it alone. This is especially frustrating because Sanctum is a great deal of fun and playing a tower defense game with FPS elements is an awesome idea. It takes a genre that’s kind of overwrought and hasn’t seen a lot of innovation lately, and takes it on from an entirely fresh point of view (no pun intended). It’s hard not to wish there was more of it to go around.

The developer behind Sanctum, Coffee Stain Studios, has added a lot to the offer of late, however. Sanctum now contains four-player cooperative play, along with new Endless and Turbo game modes, and that opens the game up quite a bit. There’s always a big strategy component to Sanctum, but throw three other players into the mix, and the game takes on a squad strategy component as well, requiring players to work together to defeat the enemies. It also means players are even more capable of intervening in what’s happening on the fly using FPS tactics; Sanctum is at its best when you can play it with one or more teammates and have to think about how you’ll deal with each of the game’s challenges on multiple levels.

Overall, the question of Sanctum’s value as a purchase comes down to its price. With just the five maps, even with the big multiplayer component, there’s just not a lot of game here, and that’s a bit of a letdown. Right now, Sanctum is available for $14.99 on Steam — and not too bad a rate, though without some friends to play with it feels a touch high. Coffee Stain Games promises more updates and DLC, which will be great. If you can catch Sanctum on sale, though (it was highly discounted during Steam’s Summer sale recently), the game instantly becomes worth the price of admission.

Ever since the first Worms game launched in 1995, the series has given countless hours of enjoyment to gamers who enjoy lobbing a variety of weapons at their opponents. The latest entry in the series, Worms: Reloaded, is now available on Steam, and we got a chance to get our hands on it and see just what developer Team17 has in store in the series’ return to PC.

If you aren’t familiar with the series, the concept is absurdly simple. You control a team of worms whose goal is to annihilate an opposing team of worms. There are a variety of ways you can accomplish this, from explosions to simply knocking an opposing worm into the water. Weapons are the most fun way, and as it’s a Worms game, you won’t be surprised at the large arsenal of weaponry you can acquire.

The default weapon is a standard bazooka that requires you to properly judge the wind, the power behind the shot, and the arc at which you fire it. However, the more interesting weapons are what make the game fun. Air strikes let you blanket an are with munitions, exploding sheep run to assault your foes, and the inimitable Holy Hand Grenade lays waste to enemies and a large chunk of landscape alike.

Speaking of the landscape, the environments in this Worms game have a charm all their own, especially since you can design your own, if you are so inclined. You’ll find yourself fighting in locales like medieval forts, construction yards, and cities. Each of these is generated randomly, so you rarely see the same exact layout twice.

Another fun feature is insane amount of customization you can do to your personal team of crack worm warriors. You can name your worms individually, just in case you want them to mirror you normal gaming group. There are a myriad of voices to choose from, including a number of languages. You can choose to have your team talk like Grandpa or like a drill sergeant. The only downside to this is that they tend to repeat themselves. A lot.

Customization doesn’t stop at your worms. You can change settings for game modes, and even create your own style for playing the game. You can also put some time into creating custom landscapes to do battle in.

Worms: Reloaded also includes a number of game modes. First up, there’s a campaign mode. While there’s absolutely no story, it is an interesting blend of killing other teams of worms and solving riddle-like challenges that force you to do things like navigate a maze using a timed jetpack or kill a number of enemies with only one shot.

There are also two types of multiplayer: Online and local. Worms has always been one of those games that could actually get multiple players to huddle around one PC, and this version is no exception. Playing with up to four friends and/or family members is a blast, especially since the game is simple enough to explain to your kids. You can also get the same 4 player multiplayer online.

The multiplayer is really the meat of the game, as the campaign seemed to get very repetitive over a short period of time. It has its highlights, especially in some of the higher level challenges that really force you to examine the environment and make it work for you. Still, you can only go through the same missions so many times before it starts to wear on you.

Overall, Worms: Reloaded feels a lot like Worms: Armageddon updated to today’s standards. It’s a fun little romp, and a great time waster in small doses. Extended play sessions in the campaign may leave you a bit bored, but the multiplayer is still spot on. With its $19.99 Price tag on Steam, it’s definitely worth picking up, especially if you’re a fan of the series, or any of the classic MS-DOS titles that preceded it (Yes, I still remember Gorillas).

For me, just being within earshot of the term “card battles” is enough to make me break out in a rash. That’s why I was even surprised in myself when I started to become interested in a game like Culdcept Saga. I never played its PS2 precursor, but the idea of card battles mixed with a board game intrigued me enough to try out the demo. Sadly, the demo only fueled my interest in this game, practically forcing me to seek out a copy — probably the only one within ten miles of my house, I might add. So does this game’s charm still hold up after several hours of card/board gaming action? Well, yes and no. My full impressions after the break.

The story of Culdcept Saga is your usual Japanese fantasy RPG fare. You know the drill: a young boy lives as a peasant (or slave in this case) until he discovers he’s “the chosen one” from a female character that he meets up with. Of course, she’s a princess and convinces him to travel with her to her father’s kingdom, so he can fight the forces of evil and meet up with all manner of strange people whose primary form of conversing is through card battles. The story is all revealed through extremely boring cut scenes with overly philosophical dialogue delivered through absolutely terrible voice-acting. The only saving grace for this is that it’s all skippable; trust me, you won’t miss much.

The gameplay is like Magic: The Gathering fused with Monopoly. And no, I’m not trying to grasp at two games to loosely compare it to. I’m saying it’s obvious that the developers had both these classic tabletop games (or at the very least, Monopoly) in mind when they started piecing together this game. Tell me if this sounds familiar: you roll a die to move around a board, you take control of spaces on the board, other people who land on those spaces have to pay a toll, you can purchase upgrades to these spaces to increase their toll, and completing a lap around the board nets you a reward. See what I mean? Of course what changes the whole system up is the inclusion of different cards which can summon monsters, items, and spells. Rather than buying up a space on the board, you place a creature there to defend it. If an opponent lands on that space, they can either summon a creature to fight you for your territory or pay the toll. There are also items you can use to give your monsters an edge in battle and spells that conjure up different effects. These all cost “Magic Power,” which you gain through various means on the board. Your objective is to acquire a certain “Total Magic Power” over the course of the game before your opponents. I know this all sounds rather complicated — and it really is — but you get the hang of it after a few rounds.

So here’s what’s good in this game: the gameplay is absorbing and addictive. I’m not one to usually get into these sorts of things, but even I found myself spending a fair amount of time pondering which cards to put in my deck, which would work well with other cards, and so on. It is very easy get lost in the game for hours as you try to plan your next course of action, while simulatneously praying for a good roll of the die. Though there’s an element of randomness to it, the game does require some strategy to ensure you come out ahead of your opponents. As you continue playing, you’ll feel yourself adapting more readily to your enemy’s strategies while honing your own. In seamlessly fusing card battling with a tabletop board game, the developers have created an entirely new play experience that allows you to build your skills at your own pace. That and you can dress your character up in a pirate hat.

Unfortunately, there’s a main flaw to this innovative gameplay, and it’s a big one: the rounds are looooooong. Playing just one battle will take as long as an average game of Monopoly, and I am not exaggerating. The very first battle of the whole game takes over half an hour, and the last round I played — my tenth, I believe — took almost two hours. And if you lose, you have to start that match all over. While I do find myself getting absorbed into each round, there eventually comes a point where I focus more on just finishing up the match so I can move on to another board. Luckily, you can save mid-round and come back to it later, but I usually find myself dreading the thought of coming back to the same scenario more than once. You’re also compelled to finish each game even if you think you’re going to lose, because you can still gain cards that way. For its part, the computer is pretty speedy with its turns, so you won’t spend a lot of time waiting for to make your moves. Of course, you don’t have to focus all your attention on the game for every second. Honestly, I’ve written half of this article in between my turns, while the CPU does its business.

Culdcept Saga is to the game world like a novella is to the literary world. It’s not small enough to be a downloadable game, but it’s not fleshed out enough to be a full-priced retail title. Thus, it costs about $40: a price that it’s definitely worth, but just barely. If you’re a patient sort of person that normally enjoys either card battles or board games, you’re sure to find some fun here. Otherwise, feel free to move right along, because this is one game that is definitely geared to a specific clientele.

I’ve been a huge fan of Advance Wars ever since the first release on Game Boy Advance back in 2001. While I’m generally not a big strategy game enthusiast (especially when it comes to turn-based games, which Advance Wars is), something about the simplistic and easily accessible formula was able to drag me in and keep me hooked. The two subsequent releases, Black Hole Rising and Dual Strike – while certainly not bad – lacked much substance. New units, a new campaign, a new mode… they felt more like what you would see in an expansion pack than a full-fledged sequel.

Days of Ruin is looking to change that, as well as the series’ cutesy image. The first three games’ characters and story have been dumped in favor of a much darker and grittier feel, which only makes sense given that this is a war game, after all. While the in-game style of graphics hasn’t really been impacted by this, the story segments have a much darker vibe to them. (Although they also have a strange, cheesy comedic vibe to them as well.) It’s definitely a change that is much welcomed, as are many others.

It’s been some time since I’ve actually picked up an Advance Wars game, but the game’s campaign does an excellent job of slowly easing you into the action. Whether you’re new to the series or a returning vet that needs a refresher, you’ll find that the early missions do a fine job of not overwhelming you. Hardcore players might be a tad annoyed that what essentially amount to tutorials can’t be skipped, but they should be able to burn through them fairly quickly.

The extra layers of depth that you expect from a new Advance Wars are all here. You’ve got new units in the War Tank (the heaviest ground unit), Flare (can reveal areas clouded by Fog of War), and Anti-Tank (.. piece it together). You’ve got the ability to “level up” your units as they destroy enemy units, allowing them to get a slight advantage in battle. New terrain will hamper your movement or provide you with cover. There’s certainly plenty of new content in this regard, so if all you’re looking for in a new Advance Wars is more content, you’ll be plenty happy.

Other, more minor changes, such as the ability to send your CO out in a unit (which subsequently gives nearby friendlies a slight boost) and CO Powers have been nerfed so that they no longer drastically change the outcome of games, and instead act as a support ability (just as they should). This leads to a much more balanced and deep game as you incorporate new units and other factor into your strategy as you wage battle.

But of course, the biggest addition is the only play, and it does not disappoint. First, the more menial things: you can both share and download custom maps made by others. So if there are somehow not enough maps shipped with the game, you’ll be able to download new maps from the AW community quite easily. Also an exciting addition is voice chat for multiplayer, although I didn’t actually encounter anyone using it while playing online.

As for the actual online play itself: it’s terrific. This is undoubtedly the best online game available for DS; it’s feature-rich, isn’t riddled with ridiculous layers of child protection that allow you only to communicate through a series of flashing colors (that actually seems ideal compared with what a lot of Wii/DS games offer) and thanks to being so well balanced, plays well every game.

When you combine online play with the stark new story direction, new content and tweaks to the gameplay, Days of Ruin definitely doesn’t have that expansion pack feel to it. While the fundamentals haven’t really been changed since the first game, I’d argue that’s a good thing – with the extra layers of polish, the game plays as well as you could possibly hope.